Managing Cleaning & Dry-cleaning Maintenance Chores

 

Managing Cleaning & Dry-cleaning Maintenance Chores



(1) Why owners should not send their cleaners back to clean the tenanted unit again upon the request of the tenants even though a General Cleaning has been done before the Handover Session (Owner-to-Tenant)?

Before any tenant moves into an investment property, the Letter of Intent would include the following common requests for owners to fulfill:

One-time General Cleaning;
One-time Aircon Servicing;
One-time Dry-cleaning of curtains,
For General Cleaning, owners would either do it themselves or engage professional cleaning company to do the job if they are too busy.
 
Cleaning Dry Cleaning Services

Such General Cleaning would usually involve vacuuming and mopping the floors of every room, wiping every table top, interior of the wardrobes and kitchen cabinets, de-oil the cooker hood and cooker hob, washing all bathrooms and toilets and cleaning windows (inside only) etc etc.

However, as the degree of “cleanliness” is very subjective, our associate ResidentAgent®s sometimes are being asked by tenants to re-send the cleaners to do another round of cleaning. Some owners may ignore such requests while others would out of goodwill, do the cleaning again themselves or request the professional cleaning company to come back to clean again.

Re-cleaning the tenanted unit on such requests, however, may not be a good idea.

This is because there may be some instances where the re-cleaning sessions are being prolonged from an original 1-2 hour session to 6-8 hours or even lasting till late night (in one case)! This is because some tenants (who may have already moved in) would instruct the cleaners to clean the whole house all over again, including areas that have already been cleaned before. At the end of the day, owners are being charged by the professional cleaning company for extra amounts.

Nevertheless, if owners were to do out of goodwill to re-clean or re-send cleaners, then what the owners should do is to ask tenants to specify the exact location to be cleaned (for example, “whole wardrobe in Bedroom 2 which is next to Master Bedroom”; “toilet bowl in Common Bathroom”; “top shelves on the right side of cooker hob in kitchen”). A fixed time frame (eg, 2-hours period) can also be specified clearly too. In this way, both owners and tenants will not have any disputes. Owners won’t be spending more than what they had already agreed with their cleaners while tenants won’t be upset again after this 2nd time-cleaning

If you need further clarification of the above issue, please contact us to find out more.

… continue reading 9 other Home Maintenance topics.